Here's a super-short history of 2,400 years of emerging markets

Modern emerging markets will celebrate their 30th
birthday on December 31, 2017, the anniversary of the
creation of the MSCI EM Index.

The team at Renaissance Capital outlined the
2,400-year history of emerging market investing, in honor of
the upcoming birthday.

The "first EM crisis" the team found was in 4th century
Greece.

Modern emerging markets will celebrate their 30th birthday on
December 31, 2017, the anniversary of the creation of the MSCI EM
Index.

The economies that we today consider to be "emerging," however,
are not necessarily the ones that would've been considered
emerging several centuries ago. China, for example, led its
European counterparts by leaps and bounds
at the start of the Renaissance.

Business Insider broke down their excellent research into a
short timeline:

4th century BC: The first EM crisis the RenCap
team could find was 4th century Greece. 10 Greek municipalities
belonging to the Attic Maritime Association defaulted on their
loans from the Delos Temple. (As a reference point,
Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great
were alive during the fourth century.)

1602: The Dutch East India company is founded.
It was the first joint stock company to have freely tradable
shares.

1720: The South Sea Bubble "would make EMs
infamous," writes the RenCap team. Even
Isaac Newton, one of the smartest people to ever live, was
not immune to the irrational frenzy of the crowd.

1804: N.M. Rothschild & Sons opens its
London office. The Rothschilds organized financing for the
first attempt at a channel tunnel between France and Britain
(1872), and Britain's purchase of Egypt's
shares in the Suez Canal (1875).

1822 to 1824: Bonds were floated in
London by Colombia, Chile, Peru, the Province of Buenos Aires,
Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Greece, and the imaginary "Poyais."

1825: The London Panic of 1825 triggers a
bunch of sovereign defaults. Peru was first, and was
swiftly followed by many others. All Latin American issuers
except Brazil were in default by the end of the decade.

Mid-1800s to early-1900s: Many "modern"
EMs begin to emerge. Russia is the first EM to see trading of
shares circa 1830 at the St. Petersburg bourse. It ceased to be
a market economy in 1917 after the revolution. A
similar story happened in China in 1949.

1930s: Over 40% of countries that Renaissance
Capital got data on were in default by 1936. The double-whammy
of the
Great Depression and rise of protectionism led to a
collapse in global trade triggering a series of sovereign debt
defaults, they write.

Post WWII: EMs tended to borrow only from
banks and multinational organizations, in dollars or other hard
currencies.

1979 to 1980: Paul Volcker's Federal
Reserve
hikes rates to 20%. "The associated dollar spike and
increase in interest costs combined with the world economy
entering recession in 1981 saw Mexico as first to announce that
it would no longer be able to service its debt, in August
1982," the team at Renaissance Capital wrote.

1980s: US banks, overexposed to EMs, pull back
more lending, leading to a bunch of defaults. The crisis hit
Latin America most broadly, but Eastern Europe and Africa were
hit, too.

1989: The Brady Plan, named after then-US
Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, plus the drop in global
interest rates, eventually helps end the crisis.

1998: "After a decade of defaults, all major
Brady restructuring were completed, and had resulted in a
liquid, easily tradable market of hundreds of billions of
dollars of standardized dollar bonds issued by EMs," the RenCap
team wrote. "Over time, more traditional hard
currency eurobonds started to be issued and Brady bonds
retired."

BONUS — 2001: RenCap doesn't add this on
their list, but we wanted to round out the history with a
modern episode: Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neil came up with the
term "BRIC" — for Brazil, Russia, India, and China — in 2001.
South Africa is later added in 2010, making the term BRICS.

"What makes an EM? There's no easy answer," the analysts at
Renaissance Capital said after going through the full
history.

"Things change over time: Greece today is considered an EM.
But in fourth century BC when municipal defaults occurred in
what we cheekily described as the 'first' EM crisis, it was one
of the worlds most advanced countries."